ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up a challenge I set myself on achieving a permanent academic post, namely, to write about the institutionalization of postcolonial studies in relation to the discipline of English Literature, accelerating efforts in the UK, US and elsewhere to globalize English Literature programs, and, the laboring lives of academic staff, especially the “early career” crowd. This means drawing on Marxist critiques of postcolonial studies and reassessments of English Literature; writing on neoliberalization and academic labor; and the everyday efforts of colleagues and friends wanting to resist systemized exploitation (of themselves and others), “enough to be able to look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m trying’”, as one of them recently put it. It also means using my own experiences as points of reference whilst appreciating that they are notably limited and come via a particular intellectual training. These influences prompted this incursion into debates about academia’s postcolonial predicament, including the argument that, for all of its concerns with difference, inequality, representation and the role of the intellectual, mainstream (or institutionally endorsed) postcolonial studies – especially its theoretical and literary wings – has not got to grips with the disciplinary logic of English Literature that shapes, masks and fuels its defining errors and limitations as an academic field. Nor has it sufficiently grappled with the systemic connections between its intellectual history and priorities, and the workaday aspects of academic labor.
